Wednesday, 8 July 2015

The Goddess Chronicle

As I write this it’s mere hours after the Nadeshiko
have been rather freakishly drubbed in the World Cup final, so it’s fitting
that we return once again to the subject of gender relations in Japan, and
especially so that we do it in consideration of a book whose notionally
feminist message I am decidedly ambivalent about.

I’m ambivalent about the book as a whole,
to be honest. The Canongate Myths series is billed as reimaginings of various
myths (the clue’s in the name, really), and Kirino seems to have interpreted
this brief fairly literally. The second quarter of The Goddess Chronicle amounts to a Greek-style chorus relating the
Japanese creation myth of Izanami and Izanaki pretty much blow-for-blow, and as
with any creation myth there’s a fuckton of begatting and proper nouns and repetition
and it’s all quite dull. If even your characters are getting bored of it then no
amount of lampshading after the fact will help gloss things over:

Hieda no Are looked up at her and released a long sigh. For the
first time she noticed that her monologue had put Izanami in a bad mood.

Her and me both. This is made worse because
it follows an opening which is as promising as it is frustrating. Namima is our
notional narrator, a priestess of Izanami, and already dead. The book opens
with a recounting of her life and early death in the furthest and poorest of what
I assume to be the Ryukyu Islands. She’s initially engaging (though never
really develops beyond this), but because we know her death is immediately
pending, the plot point whereby she must deliver food to her priestess sister—but
never open the basket!—blows past the usual Bluebeard, don’t-open-that-door tale
of temptation and redemption, into a grating holding pattern where we mostly
circle aimlessly while anticipating the inevitable. What could possibly happen
next? Though in fairness, and at the risk of some possibly unwarranted mythical
cross-pollination, the fact that it’s Namima’s boyfriend who persuades her to eat the forbidden fruit is a nifty reversal
of the roles in the Abrahamic creation story.

Sadly this is pretty much the only truly
imaginative engagement with gender in the book, and it may well be one I’m reading
into it by myself. This is not a book which embraces the fluidities of gender construction,
with its constant (and frequently tedious) banging on about the inherent duality
of existence and yin and yang and day and night and lightness and dark and
death and life and sun and moon and Jets and Sharks and blue-and-black and white-and-gold. It’s resolutely binary, is what
I’m saying, and these binaries seem to me (a straight, white, middle-class
Englishman, so caveats obviously abound), to reinforce the notions behind Japan’s suffocating misogyny, not
challenge them.

Here we shall digress slightly for an
anecdote, which I may have told before, so forgive me. This is my second
stint in Japan, and it began with a job interview back home. My interviewer was
obviously used to interviewees with no first-hand experience of the country,
and had a checklist of questions she was working through in order to see how
people would deal with what we might charitably call culture shock. One of
these was about ‘perceived’ Japanese sexism, and was posed by way of a flimsy
but apparently sincere apologia in which she explained that actually, because wives traditionally
controlled the household finances and husbands had to hand over their wages and
request an allowance, it wasn’t a sexist society at all, you see! I deflected the
question by wittering on about my former supervisor’s penchant for pachinko and
his grumbles at the end of the month when his wife wouldn’t give him any more
money for it, because I wanted the visa job and you generally don’t get
one by pointing out that your interviewer is talking bullshit.

There are of course any number of ways in
which this argument is bullshit, but what we’ll focus on here is how it elides women with wives, and the way in which it limits their ‘power’ to the private,
household sphere of home and family, while men get to stride the world in
public, striking deals and doing great deeds. The second half of The Goddess Chronicle jarringly switches
focus to the earthly incarnation of Izanaki, Izanami’s husband (and brother; you
know what gods are like), as he criss-crosses Japan fucking any women with a
pulse and foisting his babies upon them. He does this not because he likes getting
his dick wet, oh no, but because when he abandoned Izanami in the underworld (gods
are like arseholes, in case you were wondering) she cursed him by promising to
kill one thousand people daily, and he countered by promising to make sure
fifteen hundred babies are born every day. He appears to be interpreting this promise
as a personal challenge, so while Izanami remains confined to the underworld,
keeping the hell-fires burning and contenting herself with wreaking petty
revenge and spoiling her husband’s fun—she kills his lovers preferentially—Izanaki
gets free rein in the outside world. Furthermore, Izanami’s ‘power’, such as it
is, comes as a direct result of her husband’s actions. Ringing any bells there?

So far so standard; creation myths are rarely
the most egalitarian of tales. But this is a reimagining, not simply a
retelling, so where does Kirino take us from here? On the one hand, she’s very (very) determined to point out the
inherent unfairness of Izanami and Namima’s situation: both fated to live subservient
lives due to their gender. This is good and necessary. But on the other she
presents us a world in which characters are, well… fated to live in certain
ways due to their gender. While social structures which leave women disproportionally
grasping the shitty end of the stick get roundly and deservedly clobbered, the
determinism presumed to be driving the underlying gender paradigm goes entirely
uncritiqued: fate is determined by biological sex, and gender roles are irrevocable,
for all that Namima and (somewhat surprisingly) Izanaki make equivocal attempts
to cheat theirs.

Both Izanami and Namima are betrayed by the
men in their lives, and both ultimately take revenge on them by causing their
deaths. However, thus freed from the weight of social, gendered, and spousal
obligation, the book ends with both women choosing to just keep on doing what
they were doing anyway, but now with added spite. Izanami continues killing one
thousand random people every day, and Namima remains her even more devoted servant.
This would explain Japan’s shrinking population, at least, but provides a very uncomfortable
answer to the question, “What would these women change if they didn’t have to
submit to the patriarchy?” It turns out they wouldn’t change a thing.

While I don’t think this book was intended
to provide any easy answers (though there’s so much blunt, repetitive philosophizing
that it can’t be accused of over-estimating the reader’s intelligence, either),
I can’t help but feel that all it offers is a slightly chilling reinforcement
of the status quo; a reaffirmation of the power of learned helplessness. Don’t
cross the woman, bruh; bitch be crazy and she burn your shit down.

2 comments:

So I am behind on reading your (and others') blog(s), so a bit of binge reading to catch up. This reminds me of your reaction to The Cage of Zeus (I think it was), with its inability to break beyond the binary and inevitability of gender.

A sign of deeper problems within Japan maybe? Or are there actual feminists out there?

Yep, CoZ was definitely in my mind as I was reading this, and I think that both you and I know that the problems in Japan run very deep indeed. That said, I do wonder how much the word 'feminist' gets used as just a marketing tool, and then we start wondering down paths marked "Intersectionality," First Wave," "Second Wave," and so on and I get lost and start hyperventilating a little.